Oil and Pipelines Agency

OPA was formed in 1986 by virtue of the Oil and Pipelines Act 1985, to manage, operate and maintain six Naval Oil Fuel Depots and a Petroleum Storage Depot on behalf of the Ministry of Defence.

For an organisation such as OPA, that serves government projects, the utilisation of BIM processes and technology will significantly improve the efficiency and quality of its projects. We began with the development of BIM protocols encapsulated in a document suite that supports the implementation of BIM for the OPA – in particular, for its work on the redevelopment of the Gosport Oil Fuel Depot.

This is a multi-million pound project to replace 17 fuel storage tanks and upgrade other buildings on the site. The fuel tanks are over 100 years old and are approaching their end of service life. The project will ensure that the depot will be fully equipped to meet the future requirements of the Royal Navy’s new Queen Elizabeth Class carriers.

Our approach initially focused on creating a draft suite of BIM documents, including Organisation Information Requirements (OIR), Asset Information Requirements (AIR) and Exchange Information Requirements (EIR). This provided a basis for workshops to take place, to facilitate reviews and discussions enabling us to produce a final iteration of the customised document suite.

We progressed the project to the next phase, whereby we authored and delivered a training programme for key staff to introduce the documents, explaining how they work, along with definitions and specifying the optimal method for supporting BIM implementation on any new OPA projects moving forward.